Museums: Museums in digital era

On December 2 2010 at the M.I. Glinka State Central Museum of Musical Culture was held a seminar which focused on introduction of IT to the work of cultural institutions. Over 100 directors and chief custodians of cultural institutions from Russia and CIS member states arrived to take part in the seminar and discuss problems of informatization, being a part of the strategy of development and museum marketing.

The international seminar “Museum Information Technologies. Top priorities for museum informatization and prospects of development” was organized by the Electronic Archive (ELAR) Corp. Specialists of the corporation told participants of the event about tools for creation virtual collections, 3D-museums and an integrated state museum catalogue, as well as about technologies of careful high-quality scanning of old books and documents.

Participants of the seminar were shown a state-of-the-arts equipment for digitization of museum collections. In particular, a photo machine ELAR ORTERI 5000, which enables in a few minutes automatically create 3D-video and 3D-collections of pieces of art.

At the seminar ELAR experts told participants about museum projects which had been successfully implemented at the Tretyakov Gallery, the State Hermitage Museum, the Museum of Contemporary History of Russia, the Museum of the Bolshoi Theatre, the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) etc.

Objectives set by the state for museums, in fact coincide with those being set by cultural institutions themselves. On the one hand, museum should offer patrons maximum access to their holdings, while on the other — preserve unique collections.